Application launcher on META key

[Eike Hein]

On 08/01/2014 02:15 PM, Martin Klapetek wrote:
> Do you know about the patches? Are they any good/worth adopting and
> maintaining upstream?

Sorry, nope, don't have any on-hand. I vaguely remember that
openSUSE had a patch in the early 4.x days, but e.g. Netrunner
just shipped ksuperkey which is an external app that works as
mentioned (hijack press+release of meta and send a fake Alt-
F1).

For a proper solution the challenges are:
- We may have more than one launcher instance
- Our shortcuts system doesn't like modifier-only key sequences
- How to expose things in the UI

Plasma already tries to handle some of this, e.g. activatable
widgets show up in Global Keyboard Shortcuts and launchers
default to Alt+F1, but I have no idea if it's trying to handle
the multi-instance problem in some way.

It's possible that the new alternatives system can help us
there structurally somehow, since we now have a system to
identify launcher widgets as such.

As for the shortcut, I'm just thinking out of the blue here,
but maybe the ksuperkey approach isn't totally shit - maybe
we could similarly hijack an event pair and generate a
XF86Menu event and have that as alternate shortcut for the
launchers or something.

But yeah, would be interesting to hear what Martin's thoughts
are.


Cheers,
Eike